If the blood-sampling tube with the collected blood has no information for specifying a patient, it is impossible to identify the patient from when the blood is collected. Therefore the name of the patient whose blood is to be collected previously is written on a surface of the blood-sampling tube before collecting blood to identify the blood-sampling tube after blood collecting.
Recently, in most cases, vacuum blood-sampling tubes are used for collecting blood. Since reaction medicine or a treating solution are previously stored in the vacuum blood-sampling tubes, the use of the vacuum blood-sampling tubes are previously decided in accordance with an examination that should be carried out. Therefore, when collecting blood from a patient, one or more vacuum blood-sampling tubes which can be used for the examination of the patient must be previously selected.
For this reason, the hospital staff, such as a nurse, selects and takes out beforehand one or more vacuum blood-sampling tubes required to the examination of the patient from many kinds of blood-sampling tubes, before collecting blood. And the hospital staff writes the name of the patient whose blood is to be collected on the surface of the taken-out blood-sampling tubes. The above-mentioned works are dramatically complicated and must be done very carefully which tends to make the hospital staff tired.
In order to solve above problem, the automatic blood-sampling tube preparation system, which can automate preparation of one or more blood-sampling tubes required to the examination of the patient, has already proposed (Japanese Patent No. 2834595B).
The automatic blood-sampling tube preparation system stores the blood-sampling tubes of a plurality of kinds in separate blood-sampling tube containing cases for each kind. The preparation device automatically selects a blood-sampling tube required to the examination for the patient, takes out the selected blood-sampling tube from the corresponding blood-sampling tube containing case, prints patient information on a label to make an identification label, automatically pastes the identification label on an outer surface of the taken-out blood-sampling tube, and then collects one or more blood-sampling tubes, each having the identification label, for each patient into a tray or a bag.
The automatic blood-sampling tube preparation system may automatically prepare for each patient the blood-sampling tubes required to the examination of the patient, each blood-sampling tube having the label with the name of patient printed. Therefore, it becomes unnecessary for the hospital staff to make preparations of the blood-sampling tubes before blood collecting.
However, in the construction of the above-mentioned conventional automatic blood-sampling tube preparation system, it cannot be checked whether the prepared blood-sampling tubes i.e. the blood-sampling tubes contained in the tray for each patient are correct on the basis of the instructions of the doctor.
Basically, if the automatic blood-sampling tube preparation system is functioning normally, an exact number of required blood-sampling tubes should be stored in the tray. However, for example, when putting the label pasted blood-sampling tube into the tray, the blood-sampling tube may bound on the tray and may fall from the tray. Also while storing the prepared blood-sampling tubes in a tray, or while carrying a tray in which the blood-sampling tubes are contained to a blood collecting stand, a blood-sampling tube may fall from the tray.
There is a low probably that the above accidents will happen. However, taking into consideration that a serious disease may be discovered in the stage of an examination, blood collecting mistakes owing to the mistake of the preparatory step of a blood-sampling tube must be avoided.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problem, an automatic blood-sampling preparation system is proposed, the system may being constituted to paste the RFID tag label in which information for identifying a patient is written on the blood-sampling tube, read simultaneously the information of all the RFID tags of the labels pasted on the blood-sampling tubes contained in the tray and check whether the blood-sampling tubes are correct in the tray (Japanese Kokai No. JP2004-347376A).